Abstract
The image of Nathaniel Hawthorne which may be pieced out of the facts and documents of his life is complicated in fascinating ways; so is the image of him that a sensitive and imaginative finger may trace out in his art. In a more marked degree than is usual among artists, there are many Hawthornes instead of one; and out of the relations among them, the hidden warfare in the cellars, of which there struggles up to the casual observer only an occasional suffocated outcry, while all the time the house itself sits level with windows to the sun, out of this emerges whatever about him is of interest. I wish to proceed in this brief study upon these two premises: that Hawthorneâs art represents to a very large extent an obsession with his inner life, and that the excellences and the aults of the art can be directly attributed to the state of health, if that word be read in a loose way, of the inner life.
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Notes To Chapter One
For the laboring man, see The English Notebooks by Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. Randall Stewart (New York, 1941), 50. Lists of Americanisms expunged from the notebooks by Sophia Hawthorne because of their âineleganceâ are in ibid., xi, and in The American Notebooks by Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. Randall Stewart (New Haven, 1932), xv-xvii.
The Love Letters Of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Chicago, 1907), I, 57, 95-96, 134; II, 64, and passim. At one point he says, â... Do you not feel... that we live above time and apart from time, even while we seem to be in the midst of time?â (I, 121). Hawthorne was, of course, far from unique in feeling this way; he conformed almost perfectly to the stock Victorian cant about women. Seeing women in the Liverpool streets engaged in the job of pure-finding, or collecting of animal dung, his deepest concern was that some were âmarriageable girls, and not uncomely girls.â (English Notebooks, 271).
See American Notebooks, e.g., 75-89, 180-84. A study might be made of exactly how Hawthorne altered the passages he transposed from the notebooks into his fictions; my feeling, based on subjective impressions alone, is that the general effect of his changes was to make the passages in question more âideal,â less particularized. Cp. ibid., 112-14, with the relevant passage in The Blithedale Romance.
Frank Luther Mott, Golden Multitudes (New York, 1947), 115-18, 125. John D. Hart, The Popular Book (New York, 1950), says that of the Letter 2500 copies were sold in a few weeks; and that initial sales of the Seven Gables were 6500, and of The Blithedale Romance, 7400 copies, respectively. In fact, Hawthorneâs total sales, including review and authorâs copies, from 1850 to 1858, amounted to only 39,401 copies (cf. The Cost Books of Ticknor and Fields, ed. W. S. Tryon and W. Charvat (New York, 1949), passim).
English Notebooks, 98.
âFragments From the Journal Of a Solitary Man,â in Complete Works (âRiversideâ ed., Boston, 1883), XII, 40.
Of whom the last two, it must be added, are âsavedâ in some sense, though I think an essentially sentimental one.
As late as 1856 he was still talking of âthe dark seclusion in which I spent all the years of my youthful manhood...â Julian Hawthorne, Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife (Cambridge (Mass.), 1884), II, 107.
Preface to Twice-Told Tales (Complete Works, I, 16). And see also The Marble Faun (ed. cit., VI, 388-89) for an interesting comment by Hawthorne on the value and limits of art, especially in confrontation with the crises of life. But only those with false theories of art will be foolish enough to expect it to be a therapeutic.
Complete Works, IV, 14.
Ibid., I, 538.
Writing to Margaret Fuller declining her proposal that they take in as boarders Ellery Channing and his wife, Hawthorne said, âHad it been proposed to Adam and Eve to receive two angels into their Paradise... I doubt whether they would have been altogether pleased...â (Julian Hawthorne, op. cit., I, 253).
Complete Works, II, 449.
When he was trying hard to adjust his mind to European painting, Hawthorne remarked that pictorial genius âought to have the power of making itself known even to the uninstructed mind, as literary genius does. If it exists only for connoisseurs, it is a very suspicious affair.â (English Notebooks, 614). This admirably supports my view of Hawthorneâs attitude toward the ethical conditions for the validity of art. But what if he felt sure that he did not possess âliterary genius?â And it was certainly true that he had not made himself known to the âuninstructed mind.â
Randall Stewart, Nathaniel Hawthorne (New Haven, 1948), 141.
Complete Works, V, 43-45.
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Âİ 1955 Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, Netherlands
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von Abele, R. (1955). A General View. In: The Death of the Artist. International Scholars Forum, vol 2. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-9471-6_1
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